Affiliate disclosure

Which links on this site are monetised?

The index stores a single boolean per panel for this, and the figures below are read from it at page render rather than written into the copy. “We may earn a commission” is the weakest acceptable form of disclosure and reads as evasive in a market this distrusted, so we publish the count instead.

Panels in the index

129

Excluding flagged panels

With a monetised link

0

0.0% of listed panels

Carrying a paid placement

0

Rendered outside the ranking, always labelled

How does an affiliate link work here?

Every outbound click passes through our own redirector at /go/<panel> rather than going straight out. That route is excluded from search indexes, applies rel="sponsored nofollow" at the link, records the click, and sends you on. It exists so a broken or changed destination can be fixed in one place instead of across thousands of pages — and so that when we say a link is monetised, there is one system that knows.

What we record about that click is deliberately thin: the panel, the timestamp, which surface you clicked from, and a country code. No identifier, no IP address, no cookie, nothing that follows you. The exact schema is described on the privacy page.

A free listing is fully eligible for every ranking, badge and best-of list on the site. There is no tier that buys eligibility, because eligibility is not for sale.

Why can commission not move a panel up the list?

Because the ranking code cannot see it. The formula lives in one file, src/lib/scoring.ts, and its inputs are prices, domain age, uptime probes, catalogue freshness, verified reviews, published policies and unanswered complaints. There is no parameter for affiliate status, sponsorship, listing fee or commission rate, because there is no branch in the code that would read one.

Affiliate and sponsorship state does exist in the database — it has to, so that a link can be tagged correctly and a sponsored block can be rendered. It lives in two columns, is_affiliate and is_sponsored, and neither is passed to the scoring functions. The methodology page renders the entire formula directly from that file, so the claim is checkable rather than merely stated.

There is also a commercial reason it has to work this way. Commission rates differ from panel to panel, and the panels most willing to pay are not the panels most likely to deliver. A ranking that could see the rates would drift toward the highest bidder whether or not anyone intended it — which is the observable condition of most panel-ranking content already published in this market.

What will we not monetise?

Some categories are excluded from monetisation and from the index entirely, and the exclusion is enforced in the service taxonomy with a risk flag rather than from memory.

• Review-buying services. Trustpilot, Google and app-store reviews sit squarely inside the FTC’s Rule on the Use of Consumer Reviews and Testimonials, announced 14 August 2024, and inside active private enforcement by the review platforms themselves. The traffic is small; the liability is not.
• Services aimed at a third party. Downvotes, dislikes, negative reactions, negative or competitor reviews, and account or post mass-reporting exist on live panels and are tortious in most jurisdictions as well as against platform terms. Several target private individuals. We do not list them and we do not take money for them.
• Panels that ask for account passwords. A panel needs a public URL to deliver. A request for a password or write-scope OAuth is an account-takeover play, and a panel found doing it is delisted rather than downgraded.

What standard is this disclosure written to?

The US Federal Trade Commission requires disclosures of a material connection to be clear and conspicuous, which in practice means proximate to the link and unavoidable rather than buried on a page like this one. So this page is not the disclosure — it is the detail behind it. The disclosure itself appears in the footer of every page, and on the row of any monetised link as a visible partner tag.

We also disclose the nature of the relationship rather than its existence alone: a per-signup commission, a revenue share and a flat listing fee are materially different arrangements, and the table above says which applies. The funding model is additionally declared in machine-readable form — the site’s Organization structured data points ethicsPolicy at this page and publishingPrinciples at the methodology.

Note that buying engagement is not only a terms-of-service matter. Under the same FTC rule, selling or buying fake indicators of social media influence can be a civil-penalty-bearing violation for commercial actors who knew or should have known the indicators were fake. That applies to buyers as well as sellers, and it is a reason to read our terms before treating anything here as a recommendation to purchase.

Common questions